Лей Бардуго - Ninth House

“I could have ended up dead,” said Mercy. “I guess I should be grateful.”

Grateful. The word hung in the air, its wrongness like the sour clang of a bell.

Mercy tilted her head back, letting it flop on the arm of the couch, staring up at the ceiling. “My great-grandmother lived to be one hundred and three years old. She was doing her own taxes and swimming at the Y every morning until she keeled over dead in the middle of a yoga class.”

“She sounds great.”

“She was a total asshole. My brother and I hated going to her house. She served the nastiest-smelling tea and she never stopped complaining. But you always felt a little tougher at the end of a visit. Like you’d endured her.”

Alex figured she’d be lucky if she made it to the end of the semester. But it was a nice sentiment. “I wish my grandmother had made it to a hundred and three.”

“What was she like?”

Alex sat down in Lauren’s ugly recliner. “Superstitious. Religious. I’m not sure which one. But she had a steel spine. My mom told me when she brought my father home, he took one look at my grandmother, turned right around, and never came back.” Alex had asked her grandmother about it once, after her first heart attack. Too pretty , she’d said, waving her hand dismissively. Mal tormento que soplo. He was a bad wind that blew through.

“I think you have to be like that,” Mercy said. “If you’re going to survive to get old.”

Alex looked out the window. The Bridegroom had returned. His face was taut, determined. As if he could wait forever. And he probably could.

What do you want? Belbalm had asked her. Safety, comfort, to feel unafraid. I want to live to grow old , Alex thought as she pulled the curtains closed. I want to sit on my porch and drink foul-smelling tea and yell at passersby. I want to survive this world that keeps trying to destroy me.

The next morning when Alex set out for class, determined to at least try to make a good show of it, North was still there. He seemed agitated, cutting in and out of her path, hovering in her field of vision so that she couldn’t see the board in Spanish.

I know you’re not around , Alex texted Dawes when she got out of section. But did you ever find anything about severing connections to Grays? I’ve got a Bridegroom situation.

Temper fraying, she cut into the bathroom in the entryway to Commons and waved North inside.

“Just tell me one thing,” she said to him. “Did you find Tara behind the Veil?”

He shook his head.

“Then I’m going to need you to fuck off for a good long while. The deal is off. The case is solved and I don’t want to hang with your girl-murdering ass.” Alex didn’t really believe North had been responsible; she just wanted him to leave her alone.

The Bridegroom jabbed a finger at the sink.

“If you think I’m going to run a bath in there so we can have a chat, you’re wrong. Take a break.”

She thought about ditching lecture and just going back to the quiet of her warded dorm room. But she’d gone to the trouble of putting on clothes. She might as well make the most of it. At least it was Shakespeare and not Modern British Novels.

She crossed Elm to High Street and Linsly-Chittenden Hall, and took a seat on the aisle, tucking herself into a desk. Whenever the Bridegroom swooped into her view, she shifted her focus. She hadn’t done the reading, but everyone knew The Taming of the Shrew , and she liked this bit they were covering about the sisters and music.

Alex was looking at a slide of Sonnet 130 when she felt her head split open with a sudden bolt of pain. A deep wash of cold gusted through her. She saw flashes of a street lit by gas lamps, a smokestack belching dark clouds into the gray sky. She tasted tobacco in her mouth. North. North was inside her and she hadn’t invited him in. She had time to feel a flash of rage and then the world went black.

In the next second she was looking down at her paper. The professor was still talking but Alex couldn’t quite understand what she was saying. She could see the trail of the pen where her notes had left off. Three dates had been scrawled across the page in wobbly handwriting.

1854 1869 1883

There was blood spattered across the page.

Alex reached up and nearly smacked herself in the face. It was as if she’d forgotten how long her arm was. Hastily, she wiped her sleeve across her face. Her nose was bleeding.

The girl to her right was staring at her. “You okay?”

“I’m great,” Alex said. She pinched her nostrils with her fingers, trying to get the bleeding to stop, as she hastily shut her notebook. North hovered just in front of her, his face stubborn. “You son of a bitch.”

The girl beside her cringed, but Alex couldn’t be bothered with putting on a good front. North had possessed her. He’d been inside her. He might as well have shoved his hand up her ass and used her as a puppet.

“You fucking bastard ,” she snarled beneath her breath.

She shoved her notebook into her satchel, seized her coat, and hurried down the aisle, out of the lecture hall, and through the back door of L-C. She headed straight for Il Bastone, texting Dawes furiously: SOS.

Alex was limping by the time she reached the green, the pain in her side making it hard to breathe. She wished she’d brought some Percocet with her. North was still following a few feet behind. “ Now you’re keeping a respectful distance, you disembodied fuck?” she barked over her shoulder.

He looked grim, but he sure as hell didn’t look sorry.

“I don’t know what bad shit you can do to a ghost,” she promised him. “But I’m going to figure it out.”

All of her bluster was cover for the fear rattling around in her heart. If he’d gotten in once, could he get in again? What could he make her do? Hurt herself? Hurt someone else? She’d used North in pretty much the same way when Lance had attacked her, but her life had been in danger. She hadn’t been bullying him into going on a fact-finding mission.

What if other Grays found out and came barging through? It had to be the result of the bond she’d formed with him. She’d invited him in twice. She knew his name. She’d called him by it. Maybe once that door was open, it couldn’t be locked again.

“Alex?”

Alex whirled, then caught her side, the pain from her wound splintering through her. Tripp Helmuth stood on the sidewalk in a navy sailing-team windbreaker and a backward cap.

“What do you want, Tripp?”

He held up his hands defensively. “Nothing! I just… Are you okay?”

“No, I’m really not. But I will be.”

“I just wanted to thank you for, y’know, keeping that stuff with Tara quiet.”

Alex had done no such thing, but if Tripp wanted to think she had, that was fine. “You bet, buddy.”

“That’s crazy about Blake Keely, though.”

“Is it?” said Alex.

Tripp lifted his cap, ran a hand through his hair, settled it back on his head. “Maybe not. I never liked him. Some guys are just made mean, y’know?”

Alex looked at Tripp in surprise. Maybe he wasn’t quite as useless as he seemed. “I do know.”

She cast a warning glance at North, who was pacing back and forth, passing through Tripp again and again.

Tripp shivered. “Shit, I think I’m coming down with a flu.”

“Get some rest,” said Alex. “There’s something bad going around.”

Something that looks like a dead Victorian.

Alex hurried down Elm to Orange, eager to be behind the wards. She pulled herself up the three porch steps to Il Bastone, a sense of ease flowing through her as soon as she opened the door and crossed the threshold. North was hovering in the middle of the street. She slammed the door and, through the window, saw a gust of air knock him backward—as if the whole house had given a great harumph. Alex rested her forehead against the closed door. “Thanks,” she murmured.